International Trade Law Remains In the Spotlight
Matthew Nicely and Suzanne Kane, partners with Akin Gump, have extensive experience in international trade law and related regulatory matters. Here, they discuss the current state of trade law and compliance, how it has been effected by the Trump administration and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and what participants in this space can expect in 2021.
CCBJ: International trade is an incredibly complicated area. Can you describe what it is like under normal circumstances, as a baseline, compared to what you’ve been seeing during this global pandemic? Matthew Nicely: Even prior to the pandemic, so much was handled electronically already. In a lot of areas of legal practice, and business matters in general, so much of what we do is communicated over email, but now you’ve had the huge increase in the use of virtual meeting platforms. That applies to our everyday work and our interactions with the agencies. So in many respects, in both of our practices, obviously a few things needed to change, and agencies were quick to make changes to things like required paper service for filings. They got rid of that requirement, because people aren’t in their offices and don’t want paper going back and forth. So we all joined the 21st century, and we’re now sharing everything electronically, instead of on paper as much as we used to. For the most part, I think it’s fair to say that we haven’t really missed a beat in our practice areas. From a trade remedy perspective, which is what I do, there have actually been more cases, like antidumping and countervailing duty cases, filed this year than ever before. Even though the Commerce Department officials and International Trade Commission officials who handle these cases are working from home, they’ve figured out how to continue their work and interact with private practitioners in a 38
SEPTEMBER • OCTOBER 2020
seamless way. Sometimes the agencies have given themselves extensions – and given the parties extensions in turn – because of the pandemic, but for the most part it’s sort of been business as usual. We’re not having the faceto-face meetings we would usually have, but we have just as many phone calls, and if we need to see people’s faces, we have the video platforms. And surprisingly enough, I would say that the body of work is even greater than it was before the pandemic. Suzanne Kane: On the import side, from a practice perspective, I’ve seen the same thing during the pandemic. I mostly interact with the government agencies on behalf of clients, and the agencies haven’t missed a beat. Even though they’re not physically at the ports as much as they used to be, they are certainly online, and they’re continuing their audits and requests for information. On the company side, in terms of what our clients are seeing as a result of the pandemic, I would agree with what Matt said: If anything, there’s probably been an increase in enforcement actions. For our clients, and for us as well, there have been episodes of extreme supply chain uncertainty. There were periods of time when we had questions about whether goods could come in from Canada and Mexico at all, and that led to some upheaval, but for the most part it’s already been ironed out. It’s actually been remarkable how the logistics companies and our clients have managed to adapt and have their supply chains operate very seamlessly as this has all gone on. Another disruption on the client side, however, was when the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) instituted some export restrictions on personal protective equipment (PPE). There was a decent amount of confusion around what was actually covered by these restrictions, but they’ve been revised a couple of times and at this point are actually fairly narrow. But when the restrictions were first announced, it was pretty amazing how much they affected companies across
